‘The tiny ant …’

The ruler of Florence, Lorenzo de’Medici (1449–92), was also an important Quattrocento writer. He authored a large and varied body of poetry including hymns of praise, carnival songs and reworkings of classical legend. He wrote in Tuscan Italian rather than Latin, partly in order to reach a wider audience and partly to remind the world that the great Italian poets – Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio – were all from Florence. Machiavelli said there were two Lorenzos: the politician and the poet. In fact, he came as close as anyone to Plato’s ideal of the philosopher-king, a man in whom wise rule and cultural accomplishment went naturally together.

“The tiny ant …”, first published in the TLS in 2006 and then in Ted Hughes: Selected translations (2006), is one of eleven poems by Lorenzo de’Medici that Hughes translated at the request of the Italian writer Gaia Servadio, who had been asked to arrange a celebration of his poetry. Hughes, co-editor for many years of Modern Poetry in Translation, was very clear about what he expected of a translation: “the first ideal is literalness, insofar as the original is what we are curious about. The very oddity and struggling dumbness of word for word versions is what makes our own imagination jump … it is the first-hand contact – however fumbled and broken – with that man and his seriousness which we want”. Servadio began by sending Hughes other English versions of the poems she had chosen, but Hughes wrote back asking for something more exact: “an absolutely literal version – as primitive as you please, but literal”.

This extract from “Canzone IX” is a good illustration of Hughes’s approach. He sticks closely to the original’s colloquial immediacy, unimpeded here by any attempt to replicate its rhyme-scheme. But it also helps that the translator is in sympathy with the original poet. Hughes disliked various Victorian and Edwardian versions of Lorenzo de’Medici’s poems because of their “punitive, puritan manner”. De’Medici’s cheerfully animalistic outlook chimes far better with Hughes’s own energetic celebration of instinct and will.

The tiny ant …

Brings the sun’s flame, burning and clear
Out of the ancient caves.
The sage, who learns instantly
Then tells the others
Where the mean peasant cunningly hid
A small mound of grain.
So out hurries the black, possessive horde,
One by one
They come to the pile, and they go.
They carry the plundered bounty
In mouths and in hands.
They arrive eager and light,
Heavy and loaded they go.
They block the narrow path,
And collide. While one sets down his burden
The other gives him the news
Of the new booty, more attractive,
And so to the delicious labour
Always invites him.
Trodden and thick and laboured is the long track.
If each one comes with something,
Dearer, and always more cherished,
As it should be, is the thing
Without which there can be no life.
The stolen load is light
If the tiny animal dies without it.
So my thoughts
Scamper lightly to my fine woman,
Bump against hers coming to me.
They stop and confer.
Sweet is the prey
If they bring, as the ants do,
Anything at all to the precious
Immortal store.

LORENZO DE’MEDICI
Translated by Ted Hughes (2006)

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